Sooo...this guy was a challenge. A BIG Challenge. From hair colour and style issues to needle felting conundrums and figuring out how to make a crossbow, I think he has been the biggest learning curve so far!

I didn't want to make him look quite as umm, not quite angry but....fed up with everyone else's idiocy? as Daryl often comes across, lol, so I tried to give him a sort of unimpressed yet not hostile look instead. I'm not sure if I pulled that off quite right, but I think he's cute so...I'm going to have to say in the end, he gets a pass.

The wings were rather hard to do given the scale, but they had to be there -- they're almost as iconic as the crossbow. The wings are hand cut pieces of felt, with painted detail. The vest itself has those little snappy hole things. Rivets? Forgive me if I sound utterly derpy; I am completely self taught when it comes to sewing and I don't know about 90% of the correct terminologies and names for things.

He has an internal upper armature like all my plushies so they can be useful and hold stuff....like crossbows.

The vest comes off and he has his signature sleeveless shirt underneath. Oh and his zombie ear necklace... made from plush zombies! (No real zombies were harmed in the making of this plush.)

Faux fur is a pain in the butt to style, but I'm really happy with the end result! The back of his head you see here is actually the result of his third haircut!~ I think I spent about and hour just staring at a million screen-caps, trying to figure out why Daryl's (Norman Reedus') hair looked a different colour in nearly every picture I saw. I finally figured out that Season 1 pics showed much lighter hair than the later seasons, so I ended up going with the darker hair because, well, I like it better.

The crossbow is the product of about an hour and a half of work and probably three hours of agonizing over how to make it, lol. In the end I think it's recognizable and that's all that matters really, right? But he has only one arrow left so he better make it count!

I initially made the zombie ears more realistic, but then realized that a plush Daryl would hunt plush zombies so they had to look like his ears only, well...bloody.

His face is needle felted, as are his eyebrows, mouth and facial hair. The facial hair - - let's just say Daryl started out looking like a very special kind of 70's star, with a huge mustache before I came to understand that understated was the way to go.

Thank you for taking the time to look at my newest little plushie, and cookies to you if you actually read through all my rambles! Comments are always appreciated. ♥